An Irish-American Epic Told in Comic Book Form

Derek McCulloch and Colleen Doran are hoping that among the superheroes, aliens and magical creatures that dominate comic books, there’s room for a few Irish immigrants.

“Gone to Amerikay,” a graphic novel written by Mr. McCulloch and illustrated by Ms. Doran, will be published by DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint tomorrow. It’s a tale of the Irish immigrant experience in New York City, spanning 140 years, and that alone is enough to make it stand out among the fantasy fare and costumed heroes of mainstream comics.

So after the challenges Mr. McCulloch and Ms. Doran faced in telling their story – from the research needed to depict a 19th-century immigrant’s New York to finding how to convey the sound of Irish folk music on the printed page – they’re looking to meet one final challenge: Finding the book’s audience.

“I think this’ll get a lot of people who don’t normally read comics,” Ms. Doran said. “We just get in there and do the best job we can and hope people appreciate it for what it is.” The Irish-American community has gotten behind the book, she said.

On one occasion, Mr. McCulloch said with a laugh, Ms. Doran turned in two pages of art from different parts of the story at the same time – one featuring a woman doing her daughter’s hair, the other featuring a gay kiss – “and I was like, ‘Okay, we really aren’t getting the Wolverine fans.’”

“Gone to Amerikay” intercuts between three stories of Irish immigrants in New York, focusing on “the gap between what they hope to find and what they actually do find when they get there,” Mr. McCulloch said. One is a woman in the city’s Five Points slum in 1870; the second is a young actor and singer in the Greenwich Village folk-music scene in 1960; and the third is a present-day business tycoon following the trails of the first two.

It’s a sweeping, detailed, beautifully drawn story of love, betrayal and survival, with a small but crucial touch of the supernatural. It’s deliberately paced and slow to build, but the payoff, as the three stories converge, is worth it.

The book started off as an adaptation of “Thousands are Sailing,” a song about immigrants by the Irish band the Pogues. While it ultimately moved away from that, Irish music and folk ballads still play a key role in the story – they were “the obsessive soundtrack of my childhood,” Mr. McCulloch said.

But how to convey the impact of music in a medium where the reader can’t hear it? It was “tricky,” Mr. McCulloch said. Ms. Doran said she didn’t want to use the clichéd method of simply putting musical notes into the art, so she tried to convey the impact of the music by showing the listeners’ reactions.

She also faced an enormous amount of research to make sure everything was depicted authentically. One small panel, depicting a uniform, took her forever to do – because while she could find what the uniform looked like easily enough, it was nearly impossible to find what it looked like in color. “We were pulling our hair out.”

Mr. McCulloch hopes non-comics readers interested in the subject matter will give the book a try, along with comics fans willing to try a different kind of story. “I don’t really think about audience ahead of time very much, probably not as much as I should,” he said. “I write the things I want to write, and I hope that if I can sell it to a publisher, I hope that means they think they can sell it to someone else.”

Both also have other projects in the works. Mr. McCulloch is adapting a previous graphic novel of his, about the 19th-century murderer Stagger Lee, into a musical, working with Stew and Heidi Rodewald, the musicians behind the Broadway show “Passing Strange.” Ms. Doran has another graphic novel currently in stores, “Mangaman,” written by Barry Lyga, and she is working on finishing still another, “Stealth Tribes,” written by Warren Ellis.

Ms. Doran admits she’s nervous about the book’s reception. DC took a gamble on an unconventional project like “Gone to Amerikay,” she said, and “we’re all really concerned to see that if it does well, they’ll invest in more projects like this, or else it’s back to Wolverine for us. Not that there’s anything wrong with Wolverine, but I’d rather be doing books like this.”